Principal Scientist / Associate Director, Agentic AI Research for Materials Science

The role

You will own the technical direction for agentic AI systems applied to materials science. You will lead a small group of scientists and engineers to build autonomous agents that plan, run, and interpret materials experiments.

What you will do

• Define and execute the agentic AI roadmap for materials science.
• Lead the design of agentic frameworks grounded in scientific understanding.
• Hire, mentor, and grow a small cross-functional team of scientists and engineers.
• Partner with diverse teams to deliver systems that integrate with experimental infrastructure.
• Track state-of-the-art in agentic AI, scientific ML, data extraction, and reasoning models.
• Publish or present where the science merits it.
• Set the bar for scientific rigor and engineering quality.
• Own the trade-offs between research ambition and production reliability.

Required qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Materials Science, Chemistry, Physics, or a related field
• 5+ years of post-PhD research and applied ML experience
• Track record of building and shipping agentic systems, ML pipelines, or autonomous research workflows
• Deep expertise across modern ML, NLP, and reasoning: LLMs, agentic frameworks, tool use, planning, data extraction, and multi-modal data
• Working knowledge of materials science, computational chemistry, or condensed-matter physics
• Proficiency in Python and the ML software stack
• Experience leading scientists and engineers

Nice to have

• Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in agentic AI, scientific ML, or autonomous research systems
• Experience integrating agents with real-world materials science tasks and familiarity with materials data representations and ontologies
• Production experience with workflow orchestration and distributed compute on cloud or HPC
• Community recognition: invited talks, conference organizing, or community leadership in agentic AI or scientific AI

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Employer-paid life and disability insurance
• Flexible time off with generous company wide holidays
• Paid parental leave
• Educational assistance program
• Commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office based employees
• Company subsidized lunch program

About the company

Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. The company combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science.